Full Court Press
by skrappy1389
Summary: New York Leaves owner is looking for something new to help give the Leaves better publicity. So when Neji Hyuuga brings back Tenten Ama to the league the Leaves are in for a shock as well as the rest of the NBA. NejixTenten
1. Chapter 1

A.N: Okay this is my first fanfic. I' not sure how good it'll be. Well it's an AU, so hopefully you guys will like that.

Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me and neither does _Full Court Press_, which belongs to Mike Lupica. Now let's begin.

Full Court Press

1.

All Neji Hyuuga really knew about Monaco was that Grace Kelly Got old and fat there after she married the guy Neji's mother had always called Prince Reindeer.

Neji's mother could talk about Monte Carlo and Monaco as if she were talking about Long Island City. But then she'd been fixed on the princess for as long as Neji could remember. She would say, "I've always felt a bound. Maybe because we're both the daughters of bricklayers. One of us grew up to marry a Grimaldi and us of married your father, may the sonofabitch rest in peace." Neji never knew what was fact from fiction with his mother, who never stopped keeping scrapbooks of the princess until she died in that car crash on the same road Neji'd driven down from Cannes-the Grand Corniche-which was scarier than the cyclone ride at Coney Island.

When Neji finally found his hotel, the Loew's-Monte Carlo, on his own, he wondered how come more people didn't die on the side of that Corniche. You could be pushing seventy or eighty and there'd be some lunatic right behind you flashing his lights and blowing his horn, waving at you to get the hell out of the way.

Neji couldn't remember what killed Princess Grace, either a car crash or a stroke, but after making the drive himself he saw where it could have been the road that finally blew all her circuits.

He was just going to say a couple of fast Hail Marys that he and the Renault had made it here in one piece. The whole eastern part of the Riviera that Neji'd seen was pretty much what he'd expected from the movies, especially this mother's all-time favorite, the one he'd seen on Turner Classic Movies right before he came over, with the young Grace Kelly giving it up to Cary Grant during the fireworks. Except that even in Monte Carlo, with the drop-dead view of the Mediterranean from his balcony, he noticed they were doing the same dumb-ass thing he'd seen everywhere he'd been the last two weeks, Barcelona, Lisbon, France, even Rome: trying to make it more American than judge shows on TV.

It hadn't taken long for Neji to figure out that Europeans loved pretty much everything American except Americans. The whole continent was full of mean people with accents.

Tonight on the way to Stade Louis II for the game, he'd stopped at a bar Larry Bird had told him about from when Bird was with that Olympic Cream Team back in 1992. The summer Olympics had been in Barcelona that year, but Bird and Jordan and Magic and the rest of them had played a couple of tune-up games in Monte Carlo.

Bird said you had to go into the place on the name alone: Le Freaky Pub.

Neji thought it looked like about nine thousand joints on Second Avenue, just without cable or beer that was cold enough. Jesus, you only had to get thirsty one time over here to find out this was the anti-ice capitol of the world.

He nursed a couple of cold ones anyway, killing an hour or so eyeballing the tall girl barmaid. The rest of the time he tried to translate some of the conversations at the bar without having to run back to the restroom to check out _Langenscheidt's_ _Universal Phrasebook_. He didn't really drink before he scouted a game, but tonight was a little different; there was as much a chance of his being interested in somebody-else besides Earthwind Morton as there was Prince Reindeer, who was supposed to be in the crowd, running out there and dunking the ball during the pregame warm-ups.

Out loud in Le Freaky Pub, Neji Hyuuga said, "What the hell am I doing here?"

The girl bartender smiled and said, "_Pardonez-moi?"_

Neji made a motion with his hands, like he was waving off a shot. "No problemo," he said.

This close to the end of the trip Neji decided to come up with his own universal phrases, screw _Langenscheidt's._

It was strange though coming halfway across the goddamn world to see Earthwind. When they both had been in the NBA ten years ago, before Neji blew out his knee, all he'd had to do to watch Earthwind play was put on SportsCenter on ESPN. If the Knicks had a game that night, the highlights were always about him. At least before Earthwind tried to put the gross national product of Bogotá up his nose. Now Neji had come to Monte Carlo to see if Lavernius (Earthwind) Morton, playing for the Olympique Antibes in Frances First Division Men's League, had enough left for the New York Leaves to bring him back for one more shot.

"You still any good?" Neji had asked over the phone when he's called from Paris.

"The only things sweeter than myself over here is _le poo-say_," Earthwind had said. "Myself has done exactly what all those jive counselors told me: replace one jones with another."

"So replaced dope with what?" Neji said.

Earthwind whooped and said, "Some of dem mada-_mo-_selles, baby."

Neji knew that Earthwind had missed the last couple of games for Antibes, which bothered the shit out of Neji, considering the guys rap sheet with the coke and crack and even heroin, which he's always thought of as the main event. So this was Neji's last chance to get a look at him in person before he flew back to New York to give his report to Jiraiya, the Knights owner.

And if Earthwind was washed up, Neji was going to have to tell the boss the truth: After having been to Spain and Italy and up and down the France, he wasn't even coming home with a decent roll of film.

Oh, there was a couple of guys in Spain that might be able to give the Leaves some minutes and the was a Russian kid playing for Bologna named Arvy Daskylmilosevic, who in addition to having the world's longest name could occasionally shoot threes as if they were layups. But as little as Jiraiya knew about basketball-even though he'd managed to convince himself it was he and Dr. Naismith back at the beginning, cutting the hole in the peach basket-Neji knew he couldn't bullshit him with those guys.

Neji couldn't even do that with himself, not when it came to basketball.

"I'd like you to come back with somebody who can win us some games," he'd told Neji. "But not as much as someone who could sell us some goddamn tickets."

So Earthwind Morton, who was finally clean, was pretty much the whole ballgame. He was the one Jiraiya wanted. People love comeback stories, he'd told Neji. The sportswriters can write the same stories they've already done about the other junkies, and the fans will eat it up.

The p.r. guy from Olympique Antibes, Jean-Claude something, another guy with an attitude when Neji's talked to him on the phone, had forgotten to leave him a ticket. Neji found that out when he'd called over to Stade Louis II in the afternoon, but the concierge at Loew's, Lebortvaillet, had said he'd take care of it, and he did.

Neji over tipped Lebortvaillet when he came downstairs. The guy just took the fistful of those Monegasque coins that were the same as francs, and shrugged. France, Monte Carlo, it didn't matter where you were, it's like they all took some kind of course in not giving a shit.

"Could you tell me how to find the Hotel du Paris, or should I go fuck myself, _s'il vous plait?"_

The cab to the arena took him through the kind of tunnel where Princess Di had got it, and dropped him on the arena side of the Stade Louis sports complex. The sign outside said it was Antibes vs. Lyon Villeuranne, eight o'clock. Lebortvaillet said that out of respect for the royal family, each team had sent at least five of its best players, and that the rest of the rosters would be filled out with some of the better college kids from Monte Carlo and as far up as Cannes and Nice.

Neji had watched some tape on Earthwind back in New York, but now he needed to see if the guy, even in a charity game, could still do things on a basketball court only one other point guard his size-Magic- had ever been able to do.

The inside of Stade Louis II looked like it might belong to some Division I college back at home. It was about the same size as Alumni Hall at St. John's, Neji's alma mater. Neji's seat in the balcony was bright red. He sat up there sipping the local version of Perrier, waiting for the game to start.

He walked around trying to find a Coke, but the snippy girl at the concession stand acted offended that he'd even asked for one. It was like the variation of the look you got when you asked for directions in Paris or someplace, as if you'd broken a law not knowing if you were on the right _rue_ or not.

"We'ave no Coke for you," the girl said. "We'ave water, wiz or wizzout gas."

Neji knew that one; it meant carbonated or not.

"Wiz," Neji said.

Earthwind, he saw when both teams came out for the warm-ups, had defiantly put on a few since the NBA had kicked him out after he'd failed his fourth failed drug test in two years. They called it a life ban, but you could apply for reinstatement after three years if you prove you'd been a good boy.

It took only the first few minutes of the game for Neji to see that the crazy sonofabitch still had some ball in him, underneath all the tat graffiti and rolls of jiggle and the tits he seemed to have grown while he'd been over here.

Neji knew that most of the playground shuck and jive was for his benefit. When Neji had still thought he could come all the way back from the reconstructive surgery on his knee and Earthwind Morton had been an All-Star with the Knicks, they'd go down to the playground on West Fourth Street in the summer, just wait on the side until it was their turn to get into the game Once they did, they'd play all night. Earthwind wasn't doing anything harder than grass; it'd be a couple more years before he'd upgrade into the heavier stuff. So he was still the fastest big guy anybody had ever seen in those days, every bit as big and strong as Magic at six-nine, but faster, even better with the ball, especially on the run. Sometimes they'd get bored on West Fourth Street, and then they would go over to Penn Station and head down to the Bake League in Philadelphia, and kick some ass down there, on a whim, just for the fun of it.

Now just about everybody was faster, even the white guys in Stade Louis II, but it didn't matter Earthwind was better than all of them. He was doing it up like a Globetrotter for the royals, even giving a high five to Princess Stephanie-the lady next to him pointed out-as he went past her one time.

Another time in the first half, after he made a three from so far outside Neji thought it was a thirty-footer, Earthwind ran by the small press table, grabbed the p.a. guy's microphone, and said, "Yo, all you _madames et monsieurs_: Where's the damn love here?"

A few minutes into the second half, Olympic Antibes was ahead twenty points and Neji was starting to think about heading back to Le Freaky Bar, or this other place he'd heard about, called DC, when the Antibes coach put in what looked like one of the local kids, a guy about five-ten or five-eleven so skinny Neji thought he might have been a high school kid, wearing an old green Celtics cap pulled tightly down over his eyes, his jersey looking about three sizes too big. Neji looked down at the single program the wiz-or-wizzout girl had handed him, looking to see who No.14 was, the one who thought he was so cool he didn't have to take off his fucking hat.

T. Ama, it said. Neji knew that they let him go in for Black Messiah Lewis at the point. Earthwind stayed in the game but went to center now, where he wouldn't have to run too much more the rest of the night, which Neji thought was good, he didn't want to have to call Jiraiya when the game was over and tell him the good news was that Earthwind could still play and the bad news was that he'd had a fucking coronary.

T. Ama came up the court the first time, before the Villeuranne defense was set, and threw a behind-the-back pass to Earthwind from half-court. It caught the Villeuranne players so flatfooted that even Earthwind, dragging ass the way he was by now, was two steps behind everybody. He had time to mug for the crowd with this wild-eyed, amazed look before dunking the ball.

It was the same as it had always been with him: Hey, look at me.

Except the play wasn't about him.

It was about the pass. While Earth was still playing to the crowd, T. Ama was already back on defense himself, ignoring the way his pass had brought the house down, the Monte Carlo people, who'd been getting bored themselves, back into the game now.

By Neji's count, Ama had five assists the first six times he touched the ball. He hadn't taken a shot yet or come close to driving the ball to the basket. He just stayed on the outside and ran the fast break and seemed to find the right guy in Antibes every single time with his passes. Suddenly the charity game in Monte Carlo was about this skinny kid, whoever he was.

Neji couldn't tell if the kid white or mixed with something else.

It was interesting, though, watching the way the kid somehow managed to keep every body on his team involved-interesting to Neji, anyway. He had played point all his life, all the way back to Christ the King High, and he knew how hard it was, passing out the sugar, making sure everybody was happy, trying to let the hot guy stay hot and not pissing off everybody else. It wasn't just who you passed it to, it was where you made the pass, and when. Mostly passing was about creating angles. Neji knew, because Neji had always known angles, Neji's figured he saw things nobody on the court could see. It was that way even now. It didn't mater if it was college or the pros, how good the game was, Neji always imagined he was still playing the point, that he still had the ball.

It was how he felt now, watching this kid.

Who _was_ he?

The coach, Barone, had enough sense to keep him in there the last couple of minutes. The kid kept making plays. There was another half-court job, behind the back, not just hitting Earthwind right in stride but zipping the ball. The only guy Neji had ever seen who could throw that pass that way was Ernie DGregorio, back at Providence College when Neji was growing up.

There was a no-look to Black Messiah Lewis, back in the game, Neji nearly missed the pass because Ama sold him so well that he was going left with the ball instead of right.

The crowd went nuts again and the kid just got back on defense, ducking his head, just giving a little low-five to Black Messiah as he ran by.

Neji noticed Ama didn't have any tats on his skin that was the color of a light caramel.

The big finish came with fifteen seconds left, everybody was on their feet. Even the Prince, who'd just been sitting there all night like he was asleep. Antibes was ahead by a lot. Barone had taken out Earthwind with two minutes left, but now he put him back in, as a way of getting a curtain call now that the kid had stolen his thunder.

The Villeuranne coach had emptied his bench, but even the scrubs had lost interest by then, so only two of them were at the Antibes end of the court when T. Ama came up court with the ball. Earthwind was with him-somehow managing to bust it down the right, sure that Ama would give him one more piece of cake.

Ama came up the middle at full speed, looking up as he did to get one little check at the clock. When he got to the key, he saw the two Villeuranne guys on defense coming to him, like, the hell with it, they weren't going to be embarrassed one more time before the buzzer.

Ama stopped then, the ball going behind his back. From Neji was sitting, high up in the corner, the play coming toward him, the ball actually seemed to have disappear for a second, except that Ama had both hands showing, and neither one had the ball in it.

For the first time, Neji thought he detected a smile underneath the Celtics cap as the kid quickly looked left, then right, like, Oops, where did the ball go?

He was in a little crouch now, like he was bending over to tie his sneakers.

Somehow T. Ama had balanced the ball on his skinny ass, because suddenly he was ducking down a little more, reaching behind him in the same motion, flipping the ball over his head to Earthwind Morton, who dropped in a layup as the buzzer sounded and then just sat down underneath the basket as if couldn't believe what he had just seen.

Neji looked around to see how T. Ama had reacted, but all he could see was the back of No.14, disappearing through one of the doors that lead back to the locker rooms.

Neji had told Earthwind he'd check him out after the game so they could kick back and talk about old times a little bit, see his head was at. But Earth was down on the court talking to reporters and royals. Acting as if the night was still about him.

Only now it wasn't.

Neji hurried down to the locker rooms, passing a couple of grim security guards, and finally came to the Antibes locker room. He was about to go in when he saw a flash of green down the hall and realized it was T. Ama in his Celtics cap, a big black gym bag slung over his shoulder, a hooded gray sweater over his uniform, heading towards the exit.

"Yo!" Neji called out to him. "Hold on, _s'il vous plait_."

T. Ama gave a quick look over his shoulder, pointing to himself. Me?

"Yeah," Neji said.

The kid was still in the slouch, like he was going to throw that pass again, looking down.

Neji said, "_Parlez-vous _English?"

The kid said, "Sure. What about you? English your first or second language?"

"When your form New York, it's hard to tell sometimes," Neji said. "I'm Neji Hyuuga. I work for the New York Leaves."

He paused, then added, "From the NBA? In the United States."

They shook hands. Kind of smallish, Neji thought, delicate almost, but with long fingers, like a piano player's hands.

"What does the T. stand for?" Neji said. "In T. Ama?"

"Tenten," the kid said.

Then the kids gave him a big high beams smile.

"Oh, for God's sake, let's stop screwing around here."

He took off the Celtics cap and untied all the hair underneath, long brown hair, and let it fall down to the shoulders, giving the head a little toss at the same time.

"Long for Tian," Tenten Ama said to Neji Hyuuga. "Except I always hated Tian. My mom liked Tian."

Neji Hyuuga just stared at her.

"You're a girl," he finally managed.

Tenten Ama smiled.

"My whole life, practically," she said.


	2. Chapter 2

Full Court Press

2.

Tenten has started to worry at halftime that Barone wasn't even going to put her in the stupid game, which meant she wasn't going to have any fun with Neji Hyuuga at all.

She knew he was in the stands. Earthwind had been bragging about it in the locker room after the other guys had made her dress in the room next door. Tenten would have been happy to change in restroom; it never took her long, she was just there to play, not to bond. But the guys didn't want her to see them naked. For all their big talk about how well-endowed they were, for all the times they acted like they had a present for you when you were alone, put a bunch of them in a room and they had a sudden attack of modesty, because they thought you were comparison shopping.

Tenten had learned a long time ago. Most men she'd known, starting with Cool Daddy, went their whole lives without knowing how truly funny they were.

"Got a scout here, come all the way from _New _York City!" Earthwind had told her. "Want to see if I can still do it."

"Do what, eat?" she'd said.

On the way out for the second half, she almost said something to Barone, who hadn't looked at her all night. She was going to tell him, in French if she had to, that it might be his job to sit through Earthwind's audition, but not hers.

But before she did, Earthwind came over and told her to stay loose when they got back to the court. He made sure Barone was going to put her into the game. This wasn't for Tenten; Earthwind was looking out for himself, as always. The other guys on the Antibes were tired of him hogging the ball, and so they stopped passing it to him.

Earthwind and Tenten had played together before, when he would come down to gamble; he even knocked around enough to know her father. But Tenten was just some guy in the game to him, out there to make him look good. But at least he knew enough about her game to know she'd pass him the ball.

"You be ready, old man," she told him. "You don't want a pass to hit you in that cute face in from of the princesses."

"You notice?" he said. "I think the one with some mileage on her, one been unlucky in love, been eyeballin' me."

"Just be ready," she said.

Earthwind said, "What, bein' bossy run in your family?"

"Yeah, I got it from my old man, along with my ballhandling ability."

"I figure," he said.

Five minutes into the half, Barone finally called her name. She went right out and threw one behind her back to Earthwind Morton from halfcourt and heard a sound from the crowd she'd heard all her life, whether they knew who she was or not, just reacting to a high note that came out of nowhere. She gave a quick look to the low stands, looking at her the way she imagined Neji Hyuuga was somewhere. Like: Who is _that_?

Me, she thought to herself.

She remember Cool Daddy telling her once what it was like the first time he heard Ruth Brown at the Apollo, headlining a big show, how she just got into the song, not easing herself into it at all, almost not waiting for the band, as if she'd waited all day to blow the roof off the place. After that Tenten started listening to the records herself, she'd imagined she had all this Ruth inside her when she was playing ball, listening to music some crazy beat, jazz and blues and even big band sometimes, only she could hear.

She took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm herself down, thinking she couldn't be this excited after one cheer.

Could she?

Jesus, had she missed it this much?

Whatever you do, girl, don't look around.

Barone didn't wait to get Earthwind back in the game, because it was clear Antibes needed guys who could stay with her. The Serb kid, Oley Ovanisevic, was out of breath already, and kept signaling to his coach that he needed a breather, as if he was having some fatal asthma attack.

The third time down she eyed Earthwind the whole way, showing him her right hand at the same time she backhanded a little no-look pass to Black Messiah Lewis.

Black Messiah, who'd been bitching when he came out of the game for her, gave her this little closed-fist five on his was past her, solemn-looking, and said, "You must be shittin'."

Tenten said, "Keep your eyes open, baby. And your hands up."

"I hear that," he said.

It didn't take long for the guys on Villeuranne to start getting pissed about her showing them up, Tenten not knowing or really caring if they knew they were getting shown up by a woman, not even caring if the swells in the crowd had made the connection between the "T. Ama" in their program and the Tenten Ama who used to be somebody. She started getting a little shove here and there, just their way of getting her attention. Tenten knew they weren't going to get dirty, not in a charity game in front of this much royalty. But she knew she had to fight back, without something other than the elbow shots to the kidney that Cool Daddy had taught her.

So she did what she'd done the boys: made them chase.

"You ain't ever gonna be big enough to kick somebody's ass," Cool Daddy'd tell her. "So you got to wear they asses _out_."

She did that with about a minute left, when she decided to throw her Cool Daddy pass. Barone had just put Earthwind back in the game, as a way of giving him a curtain call. Tenten was feeling it now, wanting nothing more to come down the court one more time and throw her arms out, let the crowd know she could hear them, even if she couldn't allow them to see her.

But she never mugged the crowd that way, it wasn't her style. Kankurou always said it was actually the height of style.

It certainly didn't mean she couldn't leave them wanting more.

Tenten checked the clock as she come over half-court, not wanting the stupid thing to go off before she got the ball to Earthwind. He was waving for it, over to her right, but Tenten knew if she gave it up now, she'd never get it back. So she winked at him, nodding her head as she did. Feeling prettier than she ever did in makeup or a dress or her best jewelry.

Flying.

Don't mess this up, she told herself.

Do not rush.

Keep you balance, girl.

The skinny kid who'd been trying to guard her, Plexico Burrow, whom she remembered from the Lakers, came up on her and tried to read her, watching the ball. That's what they were trained to do. Follow the ball. That's how you created the angles you wanted.

Only now the ball was gone, balanced on the small of her back exactly the way Cool Daddy had taught her, balanced on what just about all the men in her life had told her, in various ways, was her shapely and adorable world-class butt.

It was really a dancer's move, from he mother, but she never told Cool Daddy that.

The people sitting behind her could see the ball, but Plexico sure couldn't. Now she closed her eyes, picturing the move, feeling it like feeling the music, knowing where everybody was because she could always do that, take a snapshot of the whole court. Now it all happened at once, Tenten leaning down a little more as she snapped the pass to Earthwind over her head, hearing one last cheer from the crowd, looking up to see Earthwind sitting on that fat ass of his underneath the basket.

While the place roared.

Before she knew it, she was heading toward the door with her bag over her shoulder, hearing someone calling out to her in tourist French, somehow knowing it was Neji Hyuuga.

When she took her cap off, she asked him if he wanted to go someplace and have a beer.

"Where?"

"My place," Tenten said.

Right away she could see the guy's wheels turning, wondering how he could have been this irresistible to her this fast.

"Relax, Neji," she said. "I own a bar."

Tenten showed in her office at DC, the name she had given the place, wanting everything to be new. She threw on a short black sweater dress and got out the baby pearl necklace from her old antique drawer. He work-the-room clothes. Neji would think she had probably gotten all dressed up for him. She didn't take much time on her hair, even though she had let it grow out. Kankurou, her ex, had always told her she looked better with it short. He'd been wrong about that, too.

There was no live music tonight; they were still trying to trying to find a band for Mondays. Tenten had gone through three piano players already, looking for somebody cool enough to remind her of Jimmy Rowles. Tonight she told her bartender and manager, Chouji, to put on _Crane's Blues_ by Coltrane.

Coltrane got right into it with "Blue Train". Tenten saw that most of the tables were occupied, some of them with the black ties from the basketball game, over for a late night dinner of a limited menu Tenten had authored herself, mostly featuring the best hamburgers and ribs and barbecued chicken in this part of the world; also the world-class steaks she demanded from butchers as far as Nice sometimes. She loved this part of the business, too, and trips to the bakeries and greengrocers, and the fun she would have sometimes just picking out new napkins, or new wineglasses, or the paintings she had scattered around the place.

People would ask her sometimes if she thought of DC as more a bar or restaurant.

What _is _it? They would ask.

Mine, she would answer.

Chouji told her the crowd at the bar had been good all night. He'd been born in Paris, but had gone to college in the States on a soccer scholarship at the University of Connecticut: his English was as good as Tenten's French. His greatest value to DC was that Tenten trusted him.

"How did you play?" Chouji asked, handing her a Chardonnay.

"Not bad for an old broad."

"How many knew?"

"That I was, in fact, an old broad?"

"_Oui, madame."_

"I don't really know." She nodded in the direction of Neji, who was sipping a beer. She caught his eye and he raised his glass at her, and smiled. "But I certainly shocked the shit out of that guy over there."

"So you've been discovered?" Chouji grinned.

Tenten tossed her head and said, "I feel so girlish and scared."

"Bullshit," he said.

"You smooth-talking French," she said. "You always have the right word for everything. By the way, when Earthwind Morton gets here, show him where we are, okay? And watch the guy whose tuxedo doesn't fit. Last time he was here, he drank all the champagne and then walked on a check as fat as he is."

"_Oui, big madame boss lady,"_ he said.

"I am so the boss," Tenten said.

When she sat down, Neji said, "You really don't mind that I asked Earthwind to join us?"

Tenten said, "I like the guy, I always have. He comes in here a lot, pops cheeseburgers into his mouth like they're M&M's. He likes the music, and there's always enough pretty girls. Nobody really hassles him."

"You think he's clean?"

"I forget. Are you a scout or a cop.?"

"I'm his friend," Neji said.

"I think he still smokes a little weed. He likes his wine. But I think he's off the hard stuff. I frankly don't think he'd weigh as much as he does if he were still on it. Remember how skinny he got at the end, with the Clippers?"

Neji looked at her.

"You know our league?"

Tenten smiled at him. "You've got a lot of questions, don't you, Neji?"

Tenten Ama, she thought to herself, international woman of mystery.

"How old are you, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Thirty-two," Tenten said. "Thirty-three in March."

Neji put down his glass. "Look," he said. "I've played ball myself."

"Christ the King High," Tenten said. "St. John's. Drafted in the second round by the Nets. Started in your first three years, until you blew your knee out. After that you mostly sat next to the trainer."

Neji said, "Okay, but I've got a couple of birthmarks I'm pretty sure you don't know about."

The front door opened, and Earthwind Morton came in with a blonde Tenten had seen him with before. Tenten was pretty sure she was one of the waitresses from the Tip Top Bar, over by the Loew's-Monte Carlo. She had seen her in the second row during the game, down from where Princess Stephanie and Princess Caroline were sitting with their father. The waitress was hard to miss, in a tight red dress barely holding in breast that seemed to have won all this year's implant awards. Earthwind was talking to Chouji, and she could see he was going to have a drink at the bar before he came over to lay some of his charm on Neji Hyuuga. Trying to be cool.

After everything Earthwind had been though, the guy still thought he could get by on bullshit alone. Tenten remembered reading an article in the internet about Earthwind's hearing in front of the NBA commissioner, right before he got kicked out of the league.

"Why do you like cocaine so much?" the commissioner had finally asked him.

Earthwind said, "You mean other than for the sheer enjoyment of it?"

Now he made a motion to Neji from the bar, _Give me a couple of minutes._

Neji said to Tenten, "You must have played ball. Goddamn, you're the best woman player I've ever seen."

"I played nine years in all. It would have been ten, except I sat out one with a knee. One year in Israel, one in Japan, with a team called Nittsu. One with Club DKSK, in Hungary, which sounds like Donna Karan sponsored the team. I really didn't become a star, or at least as much as you can be over here, until later. First with USV Orchies, later Tarbes Gespe Bigorre. Then Spain." She smiled at him. "If we get crazy tonight, I'll show you all the stamp marks in my passport."

"It sounds pretty interesting," he said.

"It was a way to make a living doing what I wanted to do," she said.

"How'd you end up here?"

"I quit playing after I got married. Then I quit being married and got this bar in the divorce, before my ex could close it, which was what he was planning to do." She sipped some of her wine. There were two levels to DC; you had to walk down three steps from the bar area to where most of the tables were, and the better light, not that there was much light anywhere in the place. That was Tenten's idea, from all the small dark New York places she liked best, where the bar was always more private. She saw Black Messiah Lewis leaning against the brass railing of the bar now; he had two of his teammates with him, and three women. Tenten gave a little wave to the new kid working the front door, Moegi, and motioned for her to put Messiah's party at the round table near the empty bandstand. "And what about you Neji?" she asked. "How'd you end up here?"

"If you know the league, you know how much the Leaves suck, right?"

"Unless the Internet made the whole thing up."

"Well, we-the Leaves-have got this new owner. Jiraiya. He buys the team, pays the Knicks a fortune to let him share the Garden with them. Nothing changes with the Knicks. They put out a good team every year and still sell out. We get about five thousand on a good night. One guy wrote last month that men's shelters are happier places than a Leaves game."

"So the Knicks still the hot ticket in town?"

"Always," Neji said. "You know New York?"

Tenten said, "I was born there."

"Where?"

"Uptown." She smiled. "I was an uptown girl. East Harlem, mostly. But we moved around a little bit before that, and after. Lived in the Bronx when I was a teenager, right around the corner from Wakefield Grace United Methodist Church. It's how I ended up at Clinton."

"You went to DeWitt Clinton?"

"I'd take the number forty-one bus, switch to the sixteen. Let me off near Montefiore Hospital. I'd walk the from there. It was just me and my father by then-my mother died when I was eight."

Neji was just watching her, his face completely calm, not feeling as if he had to jump in, just letting her talk.

"Wait a second," Tenten said, "this was supposed to be about you and your basketball team."

"There's not a hell of a lot to tell," Neji said. "We've still got the worst record in the conference, same as we did before Jiraiya bought the team and said he was going to change everything. Now they're calling him a loser, too, and it's making him increasingly nuts. He told me to come to Europe and find some ball players. Surprise me, he said. Make something happen."

"Earth is his idea of making something happen? Who's he want to bring back next? Dr. J?"

"He thinks if the guy has anything left he can probably give us some juice for the last couple of months, draw some fans, at least get the Leaves a little pub. There's some free agents we might look at after the season."

"I'll see something about Jiraiya on the Net from time to time," Tenten said. "He sounds like he wants to win almost as badly as he wants to be famous."

"You want to know the funniest thing?" Neji Hyuuga asked. "Guy's worth a billion dollars and mostly he wants to be loved."

He sipped his drink and said, "What did your father do?"

"A little bit of everything," she said vaguely.

Including time, she thought, not vaguely at all, with great clarity. He had played ball, too. But if she told him she was Cool Daddy Hatake's little girl, she was going to have to tell him all of it. And Tenten didn't expect to ever know Neji Hyuuga well enough to tell him all of it. She'd never told Kankurou all of it.

She had never told anybody.

Moegi came over and told Tenten that Black Messiah had ordered some champagne. Tenten told her to go downstairs and break out some of the good stuff, the first bottle was on her. Finally, Earthwind Morton and his date made their way over to the table, people calling out to him and applauding as he kept saying "_Bonjour, baby"_ to just about everyone in the room.

Tenten got up. She tried to turn her head, but Earthwind kissed her on the mouth anyway, then introduced her to his date, Ino Yamanaka. She presented her hand to Neji Hyuuga, who leaned down and kissed it, though Tenten had a feeling he wanted to keep going until he could bury his head in the front of her dress. What was it about guys and breasts? Tenten always figured if she crack the case on that one she might be able to figure why they were all so hot for pro football.

When everybody sat down, Earthwind ordered champagne all around tonight, he had a feeling they had something to celebrate.

Moegi brought the bottle of Moet herself and poured.

"In the words of General Patton, I shall return!" Earthwind said, with his glass in the air.

"MacArthur," Tenten said to Earthwind.

He grinned at her, showing off his gold front tooth, "Who'd he'd play for?"

They talked about the game. Earthwind wanted to know where Tenten had learned to throw a pass like the one she threw in the game, and she said, "East Harlem."

"Shoulda known," Earthwind said, nodding. "How come you never threw that pass before when we played."

"I was saving it," she said, "for a special occasion."

He turned to Neji now, as if the subject of Tenten was already starting to bore him. "When you goin' home, baby?"

Neji said, "The day after tomorrow." He leaned over to Tenten and said, "Do you mind if I use your office? I promised Jiraiya I'd call him at six, New York time, and he gets pissed if he's waiting there and I don't call when I'm supposed to. Don't worry. I'll put it on my phone card."

Tenten told him where he office was, past the bar, he could get the keys from Moegi.

Earthwind said to Neji, "Tell the boy help's on the way."

Earthwind rose to visit the men's room. Ino and Tenten nodded at each other. Chouji had replaced Ella and Satch with Betty Carter and Ray Charles singing their duet of "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Neji was gone for awhile. So was Earthwind, which worried Tenten a little bit, just because when Earthwind was still using, she was sure he'd done some of his best work in men's rooms all over the National Basketball Association.

Earthwind looked a little too mellowed out when he returned, but Tenten couldn't believe that he would risked a toke, or whatever they called it nowadays, knowing Neji could come walking in.

"You tell him what I tol' you?" Earthwind said.

Neji said, "I did. I told him help was on the way."

Earthwind pounded his chest, the way ballpayers did nowadays to celebrate something as trivial as a free throw.

"Me," he said.

"No," Neji Hyuuga.

Now he was looking right at Tenten Ama.

"Her," Neji said.

**A.N: Damn these chapters keep getting longer and longer. Hope you enjoy.**


	3. Chapter 3

Full Court Press

3.

Earthwind had left a couple of hours before, pissed off, saying he was going to the Casino de Monte Carlo, still not believing Neji was serious about the shit about a girl playing in the NBA.

Finally it was just Neji and Tenten at the table, two o'clock in the morning. Chouji was still at the bar, on the customer side, talking to big-busted Ino, who'd stayed when Earthwind got up from the table and said one last thing to Neji:

"You that hot on bringing on a girlie player back with you, you should think about that Oopsie Scissor-ewski, or whatever his skinny assed name is."

Tenten noticed that Neji's white eyes seemed to get lighter when Chouji turned off most of the lights. If the math she'd done on his career was right, he had to be about thirty-five by now, but Tenten thought he looked younger, even with his long dark brown hair starting to gray a little bit around his ears.

"A guy I know once said that the test of a good idea is if it lasts through a hangover." He said.

Tenten said, "I'm not drunk." She pushed her empty wineglass into the middle of the table, closed her eyes when she saw him looking at, then tossed a balled-up napkin into the glass. "And even if I was, what's the old line? At least I'd be sober in the morning. You're still going to be crazy."

"I'm not crazy," Neji said.

"Where do you want to start?" Tenten said. "We might as go through the whole laundry list right now. I'm too old, for one thing."

"Since when does thirty-two too old? This isn't swimming, they don't tell you you're washed up by the time you graduate college. It ain't even women's tennis, where you reach your peak before you get your driver's license. I'd look at Magic sitting there sometimes, watching the Lakers play, and I figured he could have gotten out there and kicked some ass when he was forty."

"He's Magic _Johnson_, Neji. Hello? I am two years out of European woman's basketball. Two years. I never even got to measure my game against the players in the WNBA. You talk about kicking ass? I'd watch Cynthia Cooper sometimes, playing the way she did at thirty-six, thirty-seven years old, and I'd think, People have no idea; they should have seen her when she was young, when I was playing against her. You should have seen me when I was young, Neji. I'll tell you, straight up, no lie. I was something to see. But I'm not young anymore."

Tenten looked around DC. Over at the bar, Chouji was really doing a number on Ino in the red dress, sitting on the customer side of the bar now, on the bar stool next to her. When he got over there, he was moving in for the kill.

"There were guys in the game tonight," Neji said. "You were faster."

"These guys couldn't even find a seat at the end of a bench in the NBA."

"But not 'cause they weren't fast enough," Neji Hyuuga said. "Most of them, anyways. Because they couldn't shoot or get their shot off or handle well enough. Or because they were lazy. Or just too stupid. You were smarter than anybody out there, I could see that after you were in the game for five minutes."

Tenten couldn't help herself, the smile came out of her. Neji, who'd didn't miss much, didn't miss it. "What's so funny?"

"It occurred to me that I'm the prosecutor here. Prosecuting myself. You sound like my defense attorney."

"My mother always wanted me to go to law school."

Tenten leaned forward, put her elbows on the table, rested her chin in her hands, locking er eyes on him. "The game has changed while I've been away. God, I'm not telling you anything you don't know. There's hardly any positions anymore, outside of point guard. They're all six-eight or six-nine, they're all athletic enough to defend a small country if they got a coach who'll get them to work defense."

"You still need a point guard to make it work. One guy out there who still understands the way it's supposed to look. That's what you do. And you know you do."

"I am a _female_ point guard. A retired thirty-two-year-old female point guard who hasn't played ball in the United States of America since she was a sophomore at DeWitt Clinton High School."

Now Neji leaned in. "Nobody's perfect," he said.

Tenten said "You saw me play for fifteen minutes in a charity basketball game. Now you want me to be Jackie Robinson."

"Nah, just Billie Jean King." He had this laid-back way about him even when he smiled, doing most of the work with his eyes. "I saw what I saw."

"I'm not as good as Cheryl Miller. Nobody was ever as good as Cheryl. And even she never tried what you want me to try. Nancy Lieberman was another on of my heroes, because she came from New York and the way she could pass. She made it to one training camp with the Lakers in the old days, then she got one summer with the guys, the world-famous Long Island Surf of the United States Basketball League."

"Cheryl wasn't better, she was different. You're a point guard, like Lieberman. Cheryl was really a forward, as unselfish as she was. Her best game was near the basket or going to the basket. A lot of ways? She was really a center, that's what I saw when she scored her hundred points in that high school game. I know you think I'm nuts, but your game is like John Stockton's game. Your body-with a couple of cool differences-isn't so different from his. And I'm sure you're not a little a quicker than he is, at least now."

The music had stopped. Tenten said, "Hold that new ridiculous thought," she went over to where the sound system was, and put on some Sinatra. She loved it, it was one of her favorites, a live performance he did in Sands in Las Vegas when he turned fifty.

"I don't mean to be insulting," Neji said when she came back, "but you're looking at this shit like a man."

Tenten said, "Now you've gone too far, buster."

"Tell you what," he said. "Go home, pour yourself one last nightcap. Make it a brandy. Think it over a little more, then we'll see how you feel in the morning."

"It is morning."

Neji shrugged. "You told me before you always wanted to play with the boys. I'm offering you the chance."

"I've got a business here," she said, "I've got a life."

"Let your ex-husband-Kankurou?-run the place while you're gone. How many of these did you say he had?"

"Four. London, Paris, Nice, here. I told him he could have everything else, he didn't need to give me a penny of alimony, I just wanted this one. He said it could never make money, that it was a drain on all the other ones. Now we out-earn them all, thank you. But it wasn't even about making money. It was about making something _mine_."

"What happened to the two of you?"

"He's a good man," she said. "But a very bad boy. I decided tha if I wanted to keep loving him, I had to waive him."

Sinatra was singing "Angel Eyes". Neji may have suggested it was time for Tenten to go home, but he didn't seem to be going anywhere. He didn't give up, but was smooth about it, making his pitch almost in a bored way. She liked that about him. Neji had moves.

"After I talked to New York, I booked tickets for us to go on Air France," he said, "day after tomorrow, out of Paris. All the good parts of your life story, the ones you wouldn't tell me tonight, you can tell me on the way to New York."

Tenten stood up, reached over shook his hand, made a gesture with her head toward the door.

"It hasn't been dull," she said.

He said he would call her in the morning, maybe they could go shoot around someplace, how would that be?

"I don't think so, scout," she said.

She sat on the living room floor for a long time when she got home. Even in the best of times, she had never thought of this place as hers and Kankurou's; the first time she's stood on the balcony, this had been her place, had felt more like home than anything she had ever known.

It wasn't just the apartment, and she knew it. It was her life here. It was the peace she felt. Or the fact that even when she was really alone, no man in her life, sometimes no dating at all, she felt as if everything were one _piece_: having DC and running it, being in charge, not having to count the days anymore until she was coming home off the road, from another road trip through France or Spain, because she was home, somehow feeling as if this place on the other side of the world, with it's obsession with royals and what felt like a constant tourist crowd, was just a small town to her. Sometimes she would just wander down to the sea, where she was happiest of all, and shop down there, using the hill streets, the ones leading to the harbor, as her exercise.

And there was always the International Fireworks Festival, which reminded her of one her favorite movies stacked on what she called the Great Wall of her apartment, _To Catch a Thief_ with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, one of the great love scenes in the history of the movies. Neji Hyuuga had asked her about it, saying it was his mother's favorite, not even remembering the title. Tenten told him it was alright, she had it covered.

"I'm almost better at movies than basketball," she said.

And she loved all the give-and-take. The bargaining, in French and English, with her butchers and bakers, sipping coffee and eating and marking the time until she'd go back to her apartment and pick up the clothes she would wear to DC that night. And then getting to DC in the late afternoon, her day beginning all over again, talking to the chef and the waiters and Chouji, carefully picking out the music the patrons would listen to that night, the music different every night.

Mine, she thought now.

Me.

The all-grown-up me.

Tenten got into an old Rucker League T-shirt Cool Daddy had given her, went through some of his scrapbooks, and then her own, thinking about Neji Hyuuga, who got it more than most guys ever did, even the ones who knew how good she was.

Neji didn't think she was different because she was a woman.

He just thought she was different.

"La Franchisa," the headline writers had called her in Spain.

She'd always known she was different, even before she could explain it to anybody. She knew how pretty she was; it was like she'd grown into her looks when she got to high school, nobody could call her a tomboy after that. She hadn't cared when they said that or that her height intimidated some of them now. She just wanted to play basketball. She was interested in guys, she actually liked dating once she started. But she loved basketball. Guys thought she was making all these sacrifices, playing two and three leagues at a time, starting when they were still on 106th Street, right before they went to the Bronx, and the Europe. Sacrifice? Were they kidding? That thinking was from off her radar. She just wanted to get better at basketball. She wanted to be Lieberman, the one she'd first seen at Old Dominion, the one who could run a team and pass like Cousy and would spit in your eye before she'd back up one inch. She wanted to be Cheryl Miller at the '84 Olympics, the first Olympics where television paid attention to women's basketball. Los Angeles. My God, it was like the first time she had listened to Ruth, or her father's old scratchy Dinah Washington records, or even the early Aretha. Like: Oh. So this is what it can look like. She wanted her hair just like Cheryl's, she wanted the same Converse shoes with the little star on the side; mostly she wanted that amazing _game_. It was always a team game, passing the ball, giving it up to the player who had a better shot, but somehow that made the whole thing even more about her. Tenten watched the men that year, too, watched Jordan explode like some kind of rocket. But he wasn't Michael, at least not yet. He wasn't so much better than everybody else on the court at that you couldn't take your eyes off. That's the way it was about Cheryl.

Tenten would watch her sometimes, on that little black-and-white set, and realize she'd been holding her breath.

Tenten was fourteen that year. Already she knew a lot about basketball: When she was playing, when she had the ball in her hands, when she was hearing the music inside her and knew none of the other girls on the court could touch her, she wasn't a girl or a boy. She was just a kid. Basketball wasn't something that belonged to only the guys. It belonged to _her_. And that didn't change when she'd go find a game with the guys, when she'd ride the subway over to Queens for a game at O'Connell Park, at 197th and Murdock, or Montebello Park in Queens, or Foster Park in Brooklyn, stuffing extra clothes inside her sweats so she'd look bigger than she was, no makeup, growing her hair so she'd look older when she finally took off her Celtics cap, shook that hair out the way she did for Neji Hyuuga. She'd sit there, waiting for her turn the way you did on the playground, waiting to get_ picked_, not letting on how important this was to her, not caring how lone she had to wait, trying to look cool until it was her turn, until she could say what she'd been waiting all day to say:

"I got next."

She knew once they stopped making their little comments about her being a girl, once they got through all the guy stuff-"You lost, baby?"-and she got into the game, they wouldn't let her out.

It was only one of about twelve million things that she knew that guys didn't, on and off the court.

Her dreams, about the best game, like her dream about playing to a packed house at the Garden someday-all those basketball dreams-went back that far. Tenten Ama's fantasy life. The dreams weren't about marrying Prince Charming, even though she later thought she had done just that with Kankurou. They weren't about living happily ever after, even though that's what she thought she was doing when he swept her off her feet and hey ended up here.

The big dream was the same it had always been.

The one about playing with the boys.

She knew she still could.

It didn't mean she still wanted to.

And what about they others? Why was that going to be a different now than it had ever been? Europe had been one kind of agony for her, especially the unpredictability of it, not knowing when it was going to show up, grab her right by her heart. How much worse would it be in New York, if she made it that far?

What happened at Madison Square Garden if she couldn't come out of the locker room? She'd read about other famous people, not putting herself in their shoes, just trying to find some common ground, some thread that connect them all. Streisand. Even Laurence Olivier. What, the coach was going to have to stuff a Valium in her mouth to make her go on?

She sat there a long time, going through the scrapbooks, seeing the light finally coming up of the Mediterranean. She picked up the phone to call Kankurou in England a couple of times; he'd called Tenten a couple of days ago to tell her he had a board meeting with Sir, which is what he called his old man. Kankurou had always been the one to tell her to keep playing, not because he thought a chance like this would come along someday, just because he knew how much she loved it. You're having yourself on, he'd say. God, she'd always loved to hear him talk; back when she was playing she'd call him sometimes, any hour of the night, just to hear talk. You're having yourself on, dear girl, if you think you can just lock this all away forever, tell yourself you're well done with it. Her Kankurou sounding like Jeremy Irons, just as suave as the actor and even more handsome.

She knew this had to be some kind of gimmick with the rich boy who owned the New York team. How could it not be? What was left over there in the season? Thirty games? She wasn't worried about Neji, he was a good guy. But what was he going to be able to do for her if this really was a stupid bullshit publicity stunt and nothing more? Who was going to watch her very cute backside for her then?

Step right up, see the basketball babe.

But the official merchandise while you're at it.

Tenten had decided a long time ago she wasn't going to let any guy use her for anything.

And what about the media? God, she hadn't even thought about the media yet. It made her head spin even more. What would happen when they decided they needed to know everything about her? What happened when they found out about Cool Daddy?

All about him.

What about the headlines _then_?

No, she thought. No way was she going to open herself up to all of that. She knew that's why she wasn't going to call Kankurou, because she'd knew he would give her some kind of pep talk, getting more excited than she was. She could already hear him saying, But you _must_, dear girl. She'd call Neji instead, when he was awake, tell him one last time what she'd been telling him along, that this was crazy and he was crazy and goodbye.

She was asleep on the floor, the scrapbooks all around her, when Neji called her first, asking if they go shoot around somewhere. She heard herself telling that she could scam the keys to Stade Louis II, the operations manager being a regular at DC. She'd see him over there in about half an hour.

She wore a gray Celtics sweatshirt that had "Cousy" on the back in dark green letters, along with the same No. 14 she'd worn in the game. Neji asked her about it, and she said, "My father was a Cousy guy."

Neji wore his dark green Leaves sweats, baggy, to cover his slunky old knee brace, the one he still brought with him wherever he went, in case he suddenly got the dumb urge to play. He watched Tenten get loose while he stretched out his bad leg, thinking that even in workout clothes, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, no makeup, she was the best-looking woman he'd seen in four countries. She was way whiter than she was tan or whatever the hell she was, like Jeter, the Yankee shortstop, but with the smoothest skin Neji'd ever seen in his life, and what Neji could only think of as perfect WASP-type nose and these huge dark amber eyes.

She had a guy's game, but the way she moved on those long legs, taking big strides, reminded Neji of a girl dancer.

Neji'd always loved the way girl dancers moved.

When he got out there himself, she said to him, "One-on-one's never been my game. I'm the girl who needs a good band."

Neji said, "You want to talk or you want to play?"

"Winner's outs?"

"Win by two?" he said.

Tenten nodded. "You sure that knee will hold up against a younger and more talented opponent?"

Neji looked around, as if to see who the hell she was talking about, then snapped her a two-handed chest pass. "Shoot for it, do or die."

Her ballhandling was even better than he'd thought it was in the game. Or maybe he was just paying closer attention. What he really noticed was how fast she was with the ball, almost seeming faster, quicker, on offense than when she was trying to guard him on defense. People who didn't know anything about basketball never understood that the only thing that mattered, for a guard anyway, a point guard especially, was how fast you were dribbling the goddamn ball, that this wasn't some kind of running race, it didn't matter if you were as fast as Marion Jones. You had to be fast for about fifty feet in basketball, sometimes less then that.

Tenten blew by him one time, laid the ball in, and caught it before it hit the ground.

"I know what you're thinking," she said. "'And she's a babe, too'.'

He could get his own shot, and muscle her a little on defense, make her give up her dribble before she wanted to a couple of times, and then he could use his size on her, three inches in height and arms that had always made him play bigger, to bottle her up.

What he couldn't do, no matter how hard he tried, was get in front of her.

Sometimes Tenten would beat him and, just for fun, she'd throw him a blind pass instead of shooting the ball herself, as if she wanted him to know it wasn't beating that interested her, it was showing him, up close, just the two of them, exactly how much ball she had inside her.

"You gotta come back with me," he said when they were done, pissed off at how out-of-shape he felt. Or maybe just pissed off at how out-of-shape he looked compared to Tenten, who'd barely broken a sweat no matter how much he tried to push her.

"No," she said.

She took bottles of water out of her bag, handed one to him. Neji took a couple of sips and then poured the rest of it over his head.

"I'm getting old," he said.

"You ought to ice that knee," she said.

"Players do that," he said.

"And you're not?"

"Not anymore," Neji said.

He sat there looking around the gym they used. He remembered how much he liked having the gym to himself at St. John's.

Tenten asked, "What are you thinking?"

"About lots of things," he said, stretching the bad knee out in front of him.

"Like what?"

"Like it's taken my owner a day to fall in love with you," he said.

Which wasn't technically true.

When Neji had gone to the phone at DC the night before, Jiraiya had immediately accused him of being drunk.

"Didn't we talk about your drinking before you left?" he said, the connection amazingly good, as if he were in the next room.

"I'm cold sober," Neji said. "You said surprise you. Here it is."

"You've found a woman you think can play in the NBA? I sent you over to look at Earthwind, and now you go affirmative action on me? If you're drunk it's all right, Neji, it's your last night, you're lonely, and you probably haven't been laid the whole time you've been over there. Just tell me, I'll forget you called, sleep it off and come home."

"Listen to me," Neji said, not with any edge to his voice, keeping in mind this was the boss, even if it was easy to forget sometimes. "I can bring back Earthwind. And we can get a little bump with him, and then I promise, he's gone after the season. His old act? It's an old act now. It's different with this girl. I call her a girl. She's in her thirties. I'm telling you, she'll knock your fucking eyes out. You said you wanted me to surprise you? How about if we shock the world."

There was enough silence to Neji that he had to say, "You still there?"

He looked around Tenten's office. No pictures of her playing ball, just a bunch on her desk of her and some good-looking guy-_very_ good-looking guy, actually-who had to be her ex-husband. Unless she was seeing some new guy, which was another possibility.

Except why did that matter?

"I'm here," Jiraiya said. "Let me get this straight: You've got a girl you think is good enough to play for us?"

"Us meaning the NBA? Or us meaning the Leaves?"

"Both."

"Both," Neji said.

"And if you're wrong? And I become more of a laughingstock than I already am with the other boys and girls who own teams?"

Neji Hyuuga said, "Fire me."

There was another long pause. "Even if she can play a little, this could be huge for us, just in terms of publicity and goodwill. Jesus, we could become the soccer-mom capital of the world."

"We might even win a few games along the way?"

"If we do, all the better," Jiraiya said. "But this is about something much more important than whether or not she can play, Neji."

"What's that?"

Jiraiya said, "This is about being _in _play."

"You'll get a kick out of him," Neji was saying now to Tenten. "He's one those dare-to-dream, dare-to-be-great assholes. There's no obligations here, no commitments. Shit, I know how much of a long shot this is. He says we'll work you out with the guys on a sneak, see what out coach-Danzou- says, then go from there."

"Send me one his motivational tapes. What do they go for over there, nineteen ninety-nine, plus shipping and handling?"

"C'mon," Neji said, "what have you got to lose?"

My great big fantasy life," she said. "Maybe I don't want to put that on the line. It stays a fantasy life that way."

He stared at her long enough that she looked away finally.

"You're afraid," he said.

She was in mid-drink and spit out some water, laughing her good laugh. "Absolutely."

She stood up.

"I thought about it all night," she said. "Been thinking about it all morning. And I keep coming back to: You really should've come around five years ago, Neji. Gotten a good look at the young Tenten. She was really something to look at."

"I'll be around until tomorrow," he said. "Jiraiya told me to keep Earthwind on the look, in case things don't work out with you. So I gotta talk to him before he heads out on his road trip. And I want to talk to that big Serb, Oley What's-His-Name, too, about next season."

Tenten gave him a low five.

"It's been fun," she said.

"C'mon," Neji said. "We'll make history."

Tenten threw her bag over her shoulder and headed for the gym exit, laughing that good laugh of hers one last time.

Neji knew it wasn't the time or place to get distracted, but he couldn't help thinking Tenten Ama had herself one great ass.

"I've heard a lot of come-on lines in my life, Neji, but I've got to admit, that's a new one."

He had Lebortvaillet turn in the Renault for him. Neji'd had enough of the Grand Corniche, and decided to hire a car ad a driver for the long ride back to Charles de Gaulle. He tried to reach Jiraiya before he went to bed the night before, but was told he'd gone to a movie opening. Neji'd been working for the guy only a year, but already knew that Jiraiya liked having his picture in the paper more than he liked making money.

Fuck it, Neji thought, I'll tell him she's not coming when I get there.

He overtipped the maid, checked for phone messages one more time, made sure he had his passport and his plane ticket. The phone rand and he thought it was Tenten calling, but it was just the parking guy telling "Monsieur 'Yuuga" his car was out front and his bags were already in it. Neji _merci_-ed the guy and the said, "_Un istant, si'l vous plait."_

He was sure she'd call.

She was as happy with a basketball in her hands as he used to be.

Hell, as happy as he still was.

Neji didn't even try to figure out what the hotel bill was in American, just signed his name and looked at a number so big in francs he started to wonder if he'd busted the goddamn chandelier.

He was halfway across the lobby when he saw her over in the front of the kiosk where he'd gotten his _International Herald Tribune_ and _USA Today_ in the morning. She had an oversized blazer on, denim jeans, basketball sneakers, and the Celtics cap.

And an old leather suitcase, covered with a United Nations of stickers.

"I've been thinking," she said.

"Yeah? What about?"

"What if your right?" Tenten said. "What it the coolest guy in the league _did_ turn out to be girl."

**A.N: Damn this was long. I'll never complain about other authors taking their time again. Thanks to everyone that reviewed. Please, guys, seriously, reviews help to motivate me. Nothing cheap either please.**


	4. Chapter 4

Full Court Press

4.

On the way in from Kennedy, Neji asked how long it had been since Tenten had been back to the city.

"A few years," she said, in the back seat of a stretch limousine Jiraiya had sent for them. "It was right before Kankurou and I got married. He had a piece of a show they tried to bring over to Broadway from West End. In London? We came over for the opening. And the closing, as it turned out. I don't even think we were here seventy-two hours. I didn't see much except our room at the Lowell, the Theater, and Sardi's."

The driver said he'd heard on the radio that there was some sort of major delay at the Midtown Tunnel, so he'd taken the Triboro, and Tenten had gotten the knockout first look at Manhattan she'd always like the best, everything off to their left as they came over the bridge, pow, there it was. This was the second limousine she'd ever taken into the city; the first had been with Kankurou. They'd come over the Triboro that day, as well, and when they passed the exit for 106th Street, she'd joked, "Tell him to let me off here, I can walk the rest of the way home."

When they'd gotten slammed on the FDR Drive in the Fifties, the driver had gotten off and gone west on Fifty-third. So now they were coming through Times Square, the traffic even backed up there at one in the afternoon. Neji said the Leaves' offices were across Eighth Avenue from the Garden, the back side, across the building from the post office-she remembered the post office, right?-and in the same building where CNN had its studios in New York.

"You believe how they've cleaned this up?" Neji said, meaning Times Square.

"I told Kankurou when we were here he would have like it a lot better before they turned it into a shopping mall." She was staring out the window to her left. "Is that a television studio on the corner of Forty-fourth?"

"They do _Good Morning America_ there now," Neji said. "They passed some rule while you were away that they can't do one of those morning shows if they don't have a studio on the street where you can see people from Kansas waving at the hosts and holding up signs that say, 'Hi Mom, Send Money.'"

She at back and looked out the window of the stretch, seeing the guys pushing racks of clothing as they got closer to the Garden, seeing a sign for Macy's on the left now, remembering when a subway trip down here to shop for clothes had felt like it did when she gave herself a couple of days in Paris now, remembering how she had come down here with money she had saved working that summer at the Ninety-second Street Y to buy herself her one and only prom dress when she was a sophomore. She had been asked by a senior on the basketball team, her blonde hero, Michael O'Neill, and realized she didn't have anything that was close to being elegant enough to wear. So she took the train down and found something in evening wear that fit her budget. The first thing she did when she got home was to cut out the Macy's label, in case anybody checked.

Wishing as she always did, in those early years especially, that her mother were still around to help her.

"Where are you?" Neji said, as they made the turn at Thirty-third and Eighth and the driver managed to get over to the left side of the street, where Five Penn Plaza was.

"The intersection of 1985 and the rest of my life," she said.

"You said you'd tell me your life story when you got back here," Neji said.

"I did," Tenten said. "I just didn't tell you when."

"Here's another thing maybe you missed about the US of A while you were away," he said. "Everybody get to know everything about everybody."

That what I'm afraid of, Tenten thought.

Jiraiya was standing behind his desk, finishing up a phone call, when Neji showed her into his office, Jiraiya holding up one finger, nodding his head at the same time, saying, "I love you, too, Ebisu, with all my heart. But I frankly don't love you quite as much as I did before interest rates went into the old flusher."

Then he was rocking from side to side like an impatient child, rolling his eyes, like, Please, God, wrap this up.

Tenten's first impression of him was that he looked more like a personal trainer than he did a billionaire. Or the captain of the boy cheerleaders, maybe.

He was about six-three, with two long red lines coming from his eyes, his thick long white hair spiked into every direction possible with the rest of it tired at the nape of his neck. Jiraiya wanted it to look messy, as if the spikes was meant to just pop out of his skull like that, but Tenten knew that was just for effect, she had a feeling those spikes were going to be in the same spot tomorrow, and probably every day for the rest of his life. Kankurou always said there two classes of men, the ones who just combed his hair and the ones who arranged it. Jiraiya arranged. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, tight enough to show off his pecs. This another thing that had changed in her life, Tenten had noticed, her adult life anyway, guys as interested in showing off their chests as much as women were.

He had light skin, lighter than her own, really. Tenten had read up on him on the flight over, but must have skipped the part where it told whether he was Chinese or Japanese or what. He had grown up in Los Angeles, Chinatown, she knew, and started out peddling cell phones door-to-door in South Central L.A. when he was still a senior in high school. From the looks of him, Tenten thought high school might have been just twenty or thirty minutes ago.

One time, a write from _Vanity Fair_ had asked him where he'd gotten the phones to sell in the first place.

"You remember Robin Hood?" Jiraiya said. "Well, the only difference was that I robbed from the rich and sold to the poor, though I must say at rock-bottom prices."

Somehow he went from there to starting a home computer business in Chinatown when he'd been an undergraduate at UCLA. By the time he'd graduated, he'd been trading stocks, and then he was big into tech stocks when those exploded at the end of the nineties. He walked away with nearly a billion dollars, getting out before the tech market crashed and burned. Suddenly he was thirty years old, wanting to play. He produced movies for a while, even took acting lessons himself, so he could put himself into some of his own productions. There was even a rumor that he was author of the best porn selling books called _Come Come Paradise._ Jiraiya still denies that rumor. Neji had shown Jiraiya's publicity kit to Tenten, just so she could see it was exactly like the ones the actors and actresses gave out. Included in it were the photographs re requested you use if you were going to write about him in the newspaper or magazine, a packet of clips, mostly form New York tabloids, showing him with models and supermodels he'd dated-Tenten had always wondered how you moved up, if there was some sort of way points were allotted-at various movie openings and society events.

"Him and Donald Trump," Neji had said in the car, "seem to be in some sort of weird tag-team match to see which one of them can date more Vruskas and Mariskas."

"I think I'm getting the picture," Tenten said. "The biggest turn-on for guys like this is if the supermodel's country has a bobsled team."

Now Jiraiya was coming around his desk with so much energy and enthusiasm that Tenten had this picture of them in the office starting a fast break across Eighth Avenue and then running all the way across town.

"So this is my go-to girl," he said, bowing and kissing her hand. "Sorry to keep you waiting." Then he made big show of sighing, either because he meant it or he wanted to pump out his chest a little more. "Bankers. Can't live with'em, can't burn down their big houses and then pee on the ashes."

Up close he really was awfully pretty, Tenten thought, though not in any way that would ever push her buttons.

She could have sworn he smelled like lilacs.

"Mr.Jiraiya," she said. "Very nice to meet you."

"Jiraiya," he said. "Mr.Jiraiya makes me feel too old. Times slips away from us too fast as it is."

Tenten tried not to smile as she said, "It's our most precious gift." That one she did remember from the clips; t was something Jiraiya said all the time, at least once he was into ten figures.

"Uh-oh," he said, giving her a boom-box laugh. "Busted. Neji said you had a sense of humor. I _love _that. And if you've got my material down cold, that means you know my ten building blocks to success, right? Laughter is number two!"

"Number one it modesty," Neji said, deadpan.

Jiraiya clapped Neji on the back so hard, she was sure afraid he might have busted a rib.

"I'd love to tell you Neji only talks to me this way in private," Jiraiya said happily, "but it's much worse in public."

"He calls me his big basketball brother," Neji said, grabbing a stack of newspapers off the desk and heading to the couch that separated Jiraiya's formal office from what seemed to be the most elaborate home gym Tenten had ever seen.

"Please sit down," the owner of the New York Leaves said. "Danzou, our overpaid coach, just had the trainer call to say practice is running late. We'll go over to the Garden and meet him in a few minutes."

"He must be awfully excited," Tenten said dryly. "The two of us will probably be out in front of Tiffany's in the morning, just so we can be there when the doors open."

"I'm not going to lit to you," Jiraiya said. "He's not big on new things. I imagine bell-bottoms were a very, very difficult time for Danzou."

Tenten said, "But you have specifically told him you considering putting a woman on his team, right?

"My team," Jiraiya said, showing off teeth whiter than snow.

"You did tell him, though," she said, staying with it. "So we don't all go across the street in a few minutes and yell, 'Surprise!'"

"I did! I did! Took him to Café Boulud last night and dropped it on him just as the Wellfleets arrived. 'Hey, Coach,' I said, 'what would you think about your new point guard being a girl?'"

"And he said?"

Jiraiya leaned back on what Tenten was pretty sure was a Chippendale sofa, the silk a dark green. "He said we've got enough girlie players already to qualify for the WNBA. Said we might be the first team to test positive for estrogen."

"Then you told him you were serious," Tenten said.

"I did! And he told me something he tells me quite a lot."

"What's that?"

" 'I quit.' "

Neji was sitting across the room, feet up on a coffee table, reading the _Daily News_. From behind the paper, he said, "I love when he does that."

"He dumped me before I even showed up?" Tenten said. "Usually guys have to know me a lot better before they do that."

"Not to worry," Jiraiya said, "he doesn't mean it. There's as much a chance of Danzou walking away from the ten million he's got left on the table as there was that he wouldn't go pro for my money in the first place."

Tenten knew all about Danzou; he'd already been a coaching star before she'd left the country. He had won his first national championship at Wake Forest when he was twenty-eight. He'd spent ten years at Wake, then gone to St.John's and won two more. When Tenten had gotten tired of reading about Jiraiya on the fight over, she'd read up on Danzou, wanting to know what to expect from him as much as she did an owner who thought he could get a woman into the game. Danzou still looked and acted like the boy wonder of college basketball at St.John's, even though he was closer to fifty by now than forty. He'd become a best-selling author, with one of those self-help books that evolved out of the big-ticket motivational speeches he gave Neji said cost corporations about fifty grand a pop. "I got roped into going once," he said. "Close your eyes and you could be listening to Jiraiya. Funny thing is, they think they're so different from each other. I think it was some kind of weird self-love thing that brought them together-that and a whole pile of money."

Along the way, Danzou said he would never leave college basketball, no matter how much money NBA teams tried to throw at him every couple of years.

Then Jiraiya overpaid for a coach the way he would for a new summer house in the Hamptons, or a new jet.

"Don't worry," Jiraiya said to Tenten. "I'll get him turned around. Hey, turning around people is what I _do._"

He said to Neji Hyuuga, "Isn't that right, Fast Neji?"

Still behind the paper, Neji recited, "Reach for the sky. Dream your dreams." He turned the page, showing her the back page of the _Daily News_, which was in color now, Tenten noticed. "Your life is only a great adventure if you make it one," Neji said.

"You may have noticed," Jiraiya said to Tenten, "our Neji is a bit of a cynic."

Neji said, "My ex-wife said I was a dreamer."

Tenten's head whipped around. "You were married?"

Neji shrugged. "She said I was preventing her from growing."

"You didn't say anything about being married."

"Oh," he said, "and I can't get you to shut up once you get going about yourself."

"At least I told you I'd been married."

"Step number four!" Jiraiya said excitedly, ignoring both of them. "You grow, or you go!"

All around the room were magazine covers featuring Jiraiya: _Sport Illustrated, GQ, Esquire, Men's Fitness, Details, New York. _Tenten figured this must have been two different offices once, because of the size of the gym, which featured not just high-tech equipment, but also the biggest television screen Tenten had ever seen, showing what looked like NBA game highlights and one of those crawls she'd see sometimes on CNN International, giving scores and statistics.

"NBA dot com," Jiraiya said when he saw her staring. "It gives you all the stats you could ever want on the league. Including ours, unfortunately."

"But," he continued, "if you're as good as Neji says you are, we can go from being a nonfactor to the biggest story in sports!"

He punctuated the thought by giving his upper body one of those weight-lifter rips. When guys did something like that, she always wanted to go, "Oooh," just so they wouldn't think they were wasting their big manly time in the gym.

"I'm glad you brought that up," Tenten said. "See, Neji here has no idea whether or not I'm as good as he says I am. He just happened to see me shine for a couple minutes on amateur night at the Palace."

"_Comme vous voulez,"_ Neji said, giving her that half smile again with his eyes, as if he'd gotten off a winner. He turned to Jiraiya and said, "It means 'whatever' in French. It's a polite way of me telling her she's full of shit. She knows it, too. You'll see for yourself when you see her play."

"_Je partirai demain,"_ Tenten said, and then she translated for both of them. "That mean I'm leaving tomorrow, if I know what's good for me, anyways."

Jiraiya stood up, walked over to the mammoth window facing east. Somewhere over there was the Empire State Building. People who lived in New York thought it was only for tourist, but it had always been Tenten's favorite place in the whole city, ever since she had seen _An Affair to Remember_ with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, another movie in the Great Wall stack back in Monte Carlo, the one where they're supposed to meet on top of the Empire State Building, only she's rushing because she's late and isn't watching where she's going and gets hit by a car. Tenten got mad a few years ago when she was watching _Sleepless in Seattle_, because she couldn't figure out whether Nora Ephron, the director, one of Tenten's favorite writers when she was a kid, was making fun of _An Affair to Remember_ or not, when the women were blubbering and saying how it was the greatest chick flick of al time. Tenten had never been much for chick flicks herself, but she had always been a sucker for the part where Cary Grant finally found Deborah Kerr at the end, every single corny thing they said to each other after he finally figured out there was a reason why she wasn't getting up off the coach.

Maybe it was Cary Grant, and she was a terminal sucker for English guys.

Or maybe she was just a sucker for happy endings, even sappy ones, not that she'd had many in her life.

"Listen," Jiraiya said, a little sharpness in his voice for the first time, "you didn't come all this way if you didn't want to take your shot."

"Maybe not," she said. "I also didn't come this far to embarrass myself. I won't do that to myself, and, as my friend Earthwind Morton would say, I'm certainly not going to allow you to embarrass myself."

"You can walk away any time," he said. "Neji told me on the phone he'd made that pretty clear to you."

"Abundantly clear," she said. "I just want you to tell me this isn't going to be some kind of slideshow. My father loved baseball almost as much as he loved basketball. Who was the owner he used to tell me about, the guy with a wooden leg, who sent the midget up to bat that time?"

"Bill Veeck!" Jiraiya said. "You know about Bill Veeck. He was one of my idols!"

"I'm not going to be your midget," Tenten said.

"Tough lady," Jiraiya said to Neji Hyuuga, giving him a man-to-man smile.

Men always thought "lady" came out a like a compliment when it just made them sound like condescending jerks. Lady. Babe or Baby. Chick, Girl. All in the same family, as far as Tenten was concerned. She could call herself a girl the way black guys called each other nigger. She'd even let somebody like Neji Hyuuga get away with it, because somehow, for reasons she couldn't quite figure out yet, she and Neji seemed to be speaking the same language, at least when it came to basketball.

"Boy, am I not a lady, Jiraiya," she said. "I'm so not a lady, you have no idea."

"Tell you what," he said. "Let's cut to the chase here."

He got off the couch and carelessly pulled up a Chippendale chair that matched the sofa, except the green was a little lighter. Closer to the color of money, Tenten thought.

"I didn't bring you here to waste you time," he continued. "Or my time. And the part about how you don't want me to embarrass you? If I tried my best, if I were to be my most creative best and tried to embarrass you every day for the next three years, I still couldn't embarrass you any worse than this basketball team ha embarrasses me. Okay? I have never lost at anything in my _life_. Now, I am not just losing and losing big-time-losing games, losing money, losing an ass I'm told is cute enough for a cop show-people are laughing at me. I don't want people laughing at me anymore. Okay? Oh, they can laugh hear we're bringing a woman in to play. Let'em. But you know what I want to hear more than anything else? I want to hear the sound of everybody's mouth shutting when they find out I was right and they were all wrong."

He leaned closer and took her hand. Tenten let him. It was interesting, seeing what he was like when he thought he was going well, on a roll. She knew the show was as much for Neji as it was for her.

Watch the master in action.

"I don't want to be Bill Veeck on this one," he said. "I don't want to be Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Basketball Circus. I want to be Branch Rickey, putting Jackie Robinson into the game. I've talked to a few people about this, people I can trust. You know Earl Monroe? The Pearl? Friend of mine, I hired him as a consultant. The Pearl told me this was going to happen sooner or later. Meaning a girl in the NBA. I said to him, 'If it's the right one, why couldn't it be right now?' He said there wasn't a reason in this world he could think of, as long as she was strong enough to get through what Pearl called The Shit."

He squeezed her hands now, and Tenten could actually feel the warmth of the guy, as if he were able to heat himself up as fast as a microwave. Or maybe getting this worked up, about almost everything, was just normal for him.

"Are you strong enough, Tenten?" he said. "Are you strong enough to be my number forty-two for me the way Robinson was for Branch Rickey?"

She felt a giggle coming on, but managed to keep a straight face.

"Fourteen," she said finally.

"Excuse me?"

"I want number fourteen," she said. "Providing everybody in this room doesn't turn out to be completely nuts."

"Sure," he said. "I mean ,sure. Buy why fourteen?"

From across the room, Neji said, "She's a Cousy guy."


	5. Chapter 5

Full Court Press

Chapter 5

The cover story, Jiraiya decided, was that Tenten was an actress, an unknown, researching a role about a woman basketball player in a movie with some friends of his were producing. He'd tell the players she'd won the part not just because of her acting talent, but her basketball talent as well, that she'd played some small-college ball out west, before she'd gone to Hollywood and taken classes with Julia Roberts.

"Julia Roberts?" Tenten said.

"Maybe Charlize Theron," Jiraiya. "My guys seem to have a thing for big blondes. Or I could tell them you started out with my good friend Gwyneth. Once I start with my pitch, I just like to let it happen."

The movie, he said, would be about a girl pretending to be a guy to win a bet and prove she was good enough to make the college team.

He was telling her all this as they crossed Eighth Avenue. To their right was a Garden Marquee almost as big and showy as the one our front, on Seventh Avenue. The message on it kept changing, telling when the Knicks played again, the Rangers hockey team, the Leaves, upcoming acts booked into something called The Theater. What was that? When she was a kid, it had been the Felt Forum; she remembered they used to have the Golden Gloves boxing there every year. Cool Daddy would get tickets; he liked the fights, there was always seemed to be some kid from their neighborhood who he said was going to be the next Ali. She smiled to herself at the memory of Cool Daddy dreaming big not just for himself but for everybody else, too. They'd take the train down to Grand Central, change for Penn Station, and then they'd watch a couple of fights before he'd take her across into the Garden, on those nights when he'd been able to scam Knicks tickets off somebody, usually way up, in the cheap seats, the blue ones in those days. The mid-eighties this was, when the Knicks tickets weren't hard to get because the Knicks weren't much to see. One of the first games she ever remembered was against the Utah Jazz, when John Stockton was a rookie.

Even Cool Daddy didn't know who he was, vaguely knowing that he'd gone to some college Out There, which is how he always described the West Coast, from Washington to the Mexican border. By the second quarter, though, Cool Daddy was only watching this white guard who didn't look fast enough or big enough to or strong enough to dominate the game, but was doing it anyway.

"Watch the way he makes the angles," Cool Daddy said. "See that? See, Panda? They trained to follow the ball, and he knows it."

"See that, Panda? Watch how the man's mind works. That's the strongest part of his game, way it is with yours."

See that, Panda? Sounding more like _See dat_, always with Cool Daddy…

"…what was that movie called?" Jiraiya was asking Neji now.

"_Tootsie_," Neji said. To Tenten, he said, "Sometimes I know that movie, as long as it's an easy one."

"I'm sorry," she said. "My mind was somewhere else."

Neji said, "Which year this time?"

Tenten said, "Nineteen eighty-four. Was that when Stockton was a rookie?"

Neji nodded and said, "Sounds about right. You were a Stockton guy?" He grinned when he realized what he'd said. "I mean-"

Tenten said, "I was a Stockton guy, too."

Jiraiya acted as if he hadn't heard a word either one of them had said. "I was saying that we're telling the players will be like our own little movie within a movie. I couldn't remember the one where Dustin Hoffman played the soap opera actress and Billy Murray played his wacky roommate."

"Well, okay," Tenten said, "but I only do nude scenes if the integrity of the script demands it."

Before they went inside, standing in there on the corner of Thirty-third against a West Side winter wind she remembered instantly, like another city landmark, Tenten said, "I don't mean to wear you out with this, but the coach is on board with the movie thing, too?"

"Absolutely!" Jiraiya said.

They came in through the Employees' Entrance to the Garden, around the corner from what was still the entrance to Penn Station; at least that was still where it used to be. Then the three of them walked past the security desk, down the long corridor, and took a freight elevator up to the fifth floor, Jiraiya acting as if he ran the place and not Cablevision, which Neji said now owned the Garden and everything in it and even Radio City, too.

"What happened to Gulf and Western?" Tenten asked. "Didn't they used to own the whole world?"

"They sold it," Neji said. "Or got took over a couple of takeovers ago. I actually can't remember."

They passed some hockey nets when they came out of the elevator on five, took a right, and then they were walking into the tunnel where the Knicks came walking out for games. Tenten had done it herself exactly one time in her life, her sophomore year at DeWitt Clinton, in the semifinals of the PSAL girls' tournament, the same night Cool Daddy told her they were going to Europe as soon as the school year was over and he frankly didn't know when they was comin' back, Panda. She had been last in line that night because she always was, not because she was the star of the Clinton team-which she was- but because she had always been superstitious as hell. There wasn't much of a crowd, most of it down near the court, for a girls' high school game at one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. It didn't matter to her, not even a little bit, because she was here, in the place all New York basketball kids called The Mecca, here in what she'd always heard the sweet-voiced p.a. announcer say was the magic world of Madison Square Garden…

She heard Danzou before she saw him.

"You fucking _fucks_," is what she heard.

Tenten turned to Neji. "I know I've been speaking a lot more French than English lately, but can you use it as an adjective_ and_ a noun now?"

Neji, still dressed from the plane the way she was, in his own blue blazer and white shirt, blue jeans and scuffed-up penny loafers, said, "It's sort of his trademark line, like Regis saying, 'Final answer?'"

Tenten said, "Who's Regis?"

"It would take too long to explain," Neji said, as they walked out far enough toward the court, the first rows of seats on either side of them going up like bleachers. Now they could see the Leaves players, organized in a raggedy circle around their coach at midcourt.

Danzou was five-ten if he was lucky, shorter than every player on his team. Shorter than _me_, Tenten thought. He had dark hair, hard to tell whether it was black or brown under the Garden lights, brushed straight back in that style Pat Riley seemed to have made popular for coaches who still had their hair; they seemed to be wearing it that way when Tenten would catch an NBA game on French TV sometimes. Tenten also noticed a male-pattern bald spot in the back of the little dude's head, which instantly pleased her for some reason she couldn't explain. He was wearing a dark green-and-navy blue warm-up, the same Leaves colors she had seen all over the offices across the street. Danzou was moving as he talked, like some standup guy working a theater-in-the-round, and now as she got a better look at his surprisingly young face, she could see veins popping so far out of his forehead they looked like seams in a baseball.

"You _fucking _fucks!" he said again, shifting the emphasis this time.

The players did a lot of foot shuffling, few of them even wanting to make eye contact, at least when Danzou was looking right at them. But two in the back of him-a tall lanky white kid a head taller then Danzou and having his hair long and gelled so that the back looked like a chicken's ass, and the tallest Chinese person Tenten had ever seen in her life-were grinning and rolling their eyes, as if they had heard this all before.

Suddenly Danzou's head whipped around, as if he'd had eyes in the back of his head that could see right through the bald spot.

"Something funny there, General Tso?"

The Chinese kid was at least seven-two, but he had a sweet face on him, with some fun in his eyes, at least until Danzou got him in sights. As soon as the coach did, the Chinese kid tried to turn his face grave and pointed to himself, as if he'd made a bad pass or taken a dumb shot in a game.

"Fucky fuck, that I, Coach," he said. "I the worst fucky fuck of all."

"No way," Chicken Butt said. "I'm a worse fuckin' fuck than you ever thought of bein'."

Next to him, Tenten noticed a guy she remembered from European basketball, six-eight and a city block wide, Shino Aburame. She hadn't noticed him at first, but now she did when she saw he had something written in script into his haircut. She'd been playing for Femenino Tres Cantos that year, the year she was La Franchisa, and Shino Aburame was with Baloncesto Fuenladbrada Pabellon Fernando Martin, her all-time favorite name of any sports team anywhere. The loved Shino Aburame over there, even the ones who didn't speak or read English, because there was usually someone in the crowd who could translate the "Kill" he had in his hair, or "Pain", or just "Death."

Sometimes he'd put something up there about loving the baby Jesus, just to throw everybody off.

"Maybe we should take a vote," Shino Aburame said. "Decide which of us is the biggest disgrace."

He had one of the deepest baritones Tenten had ever heard. The minute he started talking, she remembered a time when he had been interviewed on television after a game and had glared at the guy interviewing him, saying, "I_ said_, I on _hablo_ the Espanish during the game, okay, Pedro?"

Danzou said, "You guys are very funny, you know that. Sometimes I think to myself, Hey, Danzou, are they funnier at practice or when they are getting their _asses _handed to them by the Pistons?"

Tenten whispered to Neji, "Oh, can I keep him?"

Danzou glanced over to where she were standing between Neji and Jiraiya, and for a minute Tenten was afraid he'd heard her.

"Now, get the hell out of here, I'm sick of looking at you," he said, making a motion dismissing them from the court, or maybe just from the whole league. But Jiraiya was already through the opening in the press table and out onto the court.

"Hey, Dan," he said, a hand up like a traffic cop. "Before everybody leaves, would it be all right if I had a word with my guys?"

Danzou said, "They're all yours," and walked over and sat in the firs row of courtside seats, along with three men, all dressed in the same green-and-blue outfits, who Tenten assumed were his assistant coaches. When she'd first started coming to Knicks games, she couldn't even remember Red Holzman, the coach in those days, having anybody except a little white-haired trainer sitting next to him.

"I want you guys to meet somebody," Jiraiya said, motioning for Tenten to join him out there.

Tenten grabbed Neji's arm and said, "You come, too. I'm not going into the mixer alone."

Half the players were sitting now, eyeing her speculatively. The rest just stood there in the same kind of slouch, giving her the same kind of attitude she always used to see on the playground when they saw it was a girl coming into the game; acting put out that they had to listen to another asshole in love with his own voice, this one the boss asshole.

Of all the Leaves out there, there were only three Tenten recognized for sure: Shino Aburame; Gaara Suna, a veteran point guard with flaming red hair pointed in all directions; and Naruto Uzumaki, everybody's All American, the Mr. Perfect everybody had gotten so excited about at the last Olympics, his bright blond hair and WASP-y good looks making him almost as pretty as Jiraiya.

"I want you guys to meet Tenten Ama," Jiraiya said. "You haven't heard of her yet, but you're going to, I promise."

"You dance, baby?" Gaara said, playing to the rest of the boys. "I think I mighta had you on my lap the other night, over at The Swing."

Tenten started to say something, but Naruto Uzumaki beat her to it.

"I keep meaning to ask you, Gaara," he said. "When was the last time you saw one of your dates with her clothes _on_ before they were off?"

"You sure you want to be askin' my advice about women's clothing?"

"Good one, Gaara. No kidding. Anybody got a pen so I can write down another one for your devastatingly clever one-liners?"

Gaara started to take a step toward Uzumaki, but Jiraiya, smiling, stepped between them like a camp counselor.

"I hate to break up the bonding thing," he said, "but I jut wanted you all to know Tenten is going to be working out with us for a few days, researching a role in a movie-"

"Aw, man, funk dat," Gaara Suna said.

"You wish," somebody said, and most of the Leaves laughed.

Jiraiya waved his arms, asking for quiet. "Listen, it's only going to be a couple of days. And don't worry, Tenten's played some college ball in her time. So she might surprise you."

"Ooh, I got it," Chicken Butt said now, affecting a high-pitched voice. "We into that you-go-girl shit."

Tenten wondered how she would play it, quickly deciding on modest. It was Kankurou who had once said to her to never se irony in an underdeveloped country. He usually meant France, but Tenten was petty sure it applied to the modern NBA, too.

"I promise not to mess you guys up too much," she said. "If I do, I'm out of here, I promise."

"What movies you been in?" Gaara asked.

"Probably none of your favorites," Naruto Uzumaki said. "You know, from the hotel."

Gaara said, "The only reason I'm not tellin' you to kiss my ass, Uzumaki, is on the count of I don't want to put no ideas in your head."

It had always fascinated Tenten, as far back as she could remember, how dumb this playground stuff sounded-even if the playground was the Garden itself now-and how important it was to guys not to lose face. When she was younger, she used to think it was all for her benefit, just because there was a girl present, but over time, after she'd witnessed enough of these scenes, she'd figured out it was a lot deeper than that. Guys would talk themselves into a corner and then they'd have to settle things with a stupid fight, or somebody'd have to come up with a solution where nobody had to back down.

She'd been about fourteen, after a game at the Boys and Girls Club of Astoria, Twenty-first and Thirtieth Drive in Queens, over near Astoria Houses, when she'd first heard somebody say, "If girls didn't have no pussy, there'd be a bounty on them." And she wondered: You mean after the bounty hunters finished with all the boys?

Now Naruto Uzumaki said, "Okay, okay, I'll shut up now. But before I do, you've got to let me ask one more question, Gar: Who told you your hair looks good that way?"

"Guys, guys, guys," Jiraiya said, his voice loud with all the Garden seats empty. "Miss Ama is going to get the idea that we've got one of those dysfunctional families going here."

"Yeah, we nothin' like that," Chicken Butt said. "We more unified than the Fellowhood of Christian Ath-o-letes, or whatnot." He extended a hand to Tenten. "Sasuke Uchiha. Number-one draft pick, University of Nevada, Las Vegas."

Tenten said, "Nice to meet you, Sasuke."

"You got any dinner plans, baby?" he asked, getting a laugh out of the rest of them.

"Unfortunately, I do," she said. "I plan to devour Coach Danzou's playbook so I don't embarrass myself tomorrow."

"Your loss," the kid said.

She couldn't help it, he did look like a kid to her, even if he was out of college. Tenten didn't think of herself as old, knew she didn't look old. But there was a part of her that knew she also wasn't young anymore. Especially not in basketball. Certainly not here.

Sasuke Uchiha and Gaara walked off together, looking back at Tenten a couple of times, giggling. When they got into the tunnel, Tenten saw that Gaara couldn't stop himself from making a humping motion with his hips, which made Sasuke roar.

"Well," Jiraiya said, clapping his hands together. "I thought that went pretty well, all things considered."

"Relative to what?" Tenten said.

"They're just being guys," Neji Hyuuga said. They could all hear the laughter now coming from the hallway. "Frankly, they can't help themselves."

"No," Tenten said. "You can't."

Danzou's office was to the left when you came off the court, past pictures of Frank Sinatra and John McEnroe and Simon and Garfunkle and Joe Frazier standing over Muhammad Ali, even Bob Hope with Bill Crosby, big color pictures beautifully mounted on both walls.

There wasn't much to the small office: a desk, a small leather sofa, three of four folding chairs, a small blackboard on the wall, and a color television with VCR. There was a plaque on Danzou's desk that had to be from Jiraiya, saying, "Go or Grow!"

Danzou was seated behind the desk when she came in and made no move to get up, not that she cared. She noticed he was wearing some kind of diamond-studded championship ring, with a ruby setting the size of a coffee mug. It was another thing that had happened in sports without Tenten noticing: Guys now were as obsessed with the size of their championship rings as they were with their favorite part.

"Which national championship?" Tenten asked, pointing toward his right hand.

"The last one. St.John's. Beat Florida in the final, at the Georgia Dome." He turned around a photograph on his desk, one in an elegant frame, so Tenten could see it. In the picture, Danzou was on the top step of a ladder, cutting down the net. "I don't keep it here because it was the last time I won anything," he said. "I just want to remind myself there was a time in my life when I wasn't this pissed off all the time."

Tenten sat down. This close to her, Danzou looked younger than he had outside when he was in his tough-guy pose, talking the way he obviously thought tough guys were supposed to talk in sports. But he looked tired, too, as if he hadn't gotten too much sleep lately.

Like maybe for the last three years. There was so much dark coloring around his eyes, it looked like a bad mascara job to Tenten.

"You wanted to talk to me alone," he said.

"I did," she said. "Your boss seems to mean well, but he does have this way of dominating all available air space."

"Tell me about it," Danzou said. He tried to smile, but it was clear he didn't really mean it, so it ended up looking more like some kind of tic. "He can't make the record books, so now he's going for the history books. Like he's sending you into space instead of an NBA game."

Tenten was starting to feel tired herself. She'd only been here for four hours, and it was starting to feel like four days.

"Listen, don't take this the wrong way," Danzou said, "but this is the dumbest goddamned nitwit idea I've ever heard of in my life."

"Okay, then," Tenten said, with a lot more enthusiasm than she was feeling, "we've found some common ground here."

She didn't know if she was consciously trying to keep things light, or if she was worried that at any second he might be calling her a fucking fuck He was an edgy little dud, clasping and unclasping small hands together, jiggling his knees underneath the desk.

"It didn't seem to prevent you from coming here."

"Busted!" she said, making herself sound like Jiraiya for him. "Neji talked me into it."

"Neji Hyuuga is a has-been point guard who hasn't gotten over the fact that he didn't grow up to be the greatest New York City guard since Tiny Archibald. Okay? And with all due respect, Miss Tenten Ama, Neji didn't talk you into shit."

Tenten laughed; this time she couldn't help herself, it just jumped out of her. Danzou looked at her. "What's so funny?" he said.

"Sorry," she said, "but I always get a kick out of 'with all due respect.' Nothing good ever comes after 'with all due respect' in the history of the world."

"You really do think you're in a movie, don't you? What's the one where the old guy sells his soul to play for the Yankees? Except you're selling your soul to Jiraiya."

"Actually, I thought you were the one who did that, Coach." Tenten said.

Danzou made a motion in the air like refs do when they're counting your basket after you get fouled. "Score the goal," he said. "There's a difference between us though. Other than the obvious. I know my limitations."

"How do you know I don't?" Tenten said. "You don't know anything about me, other than you think we're going to be in Jiraiya's circus together."

"I know enough to know that he's kidding himself and you're kidding yourself. Do you actually believe you're good enough to go from the Barcelona Big Babes, or whatever the hell the last team you played for was called, to the National Freaking Basketball Association?"

"That's what we're here to find out, isn't it? Whether or not I'm good to go?"

There was a small refrigerator Tenten hadn't noticed before underneath the TV. set. Danzou pushed his swivel chair over there, got a Diet Coke, made a motion like offering Tenten one. She shook her head no. He popped the can and drank about half of it down.

"You know, I'm glad it's just the two of us having this conversation. Really, I am. If the boy owner were here, I'd have to lie a little, or maybe even a lot. But now I feel I can be honest."

Tenten was going to tell him honesty was like riding a bike, it would come back to him, but he kept right on going.

"You have no shot," he said.

"Thank you."

"My opinion. Okay? You in any kind of game shape?"

"No."

"When was the last time you played in one of those girls leagues over there?"

Girls leagues. She let it go. "Two years in the spring. But I play a lot of pick up ball and I help coach the boys' high school team at the Palace School in Monte Carlo. We don't even suit up ten, so I play all the time."

"Well, there you go. The Palace School in Monte Fucking Carlo. For a second there, I was worried you hadn't been tested lately."

"I'm sorry I didn't bring my audition tape."

He rubbed his eyes, hard, with both hands. "Why'd you quit, anyway?"

"I got married. I got tired before I got married."

"Tired of playing?"

"Tired of playing on front of no crowds. Tired of having no real future. And not nearly enough of a past, frankly."

"Somebody here did a computer search this morning. They said you were pretty big in Spain."

"Even when I was, I wasn't," Tenten said.

"How come you didn't come back and try out for the WNBA when they started the WNBA? If you're as good as the great talent scout Neji Hyuuga says you are, you could've been a star."

Tenten said, "You know how we can get along a lot better? Lay off Neji."

He put up both his hands, saying, "What about the WNBA? I'm not saying you could've gotten rich, but you could have finally made some real money."

"It was never about the money with me."

"That used to e my line," Danzou said, with what actually sounded to Tenten like genuine regret.

Sounding like a human being for the first time.

Tenten said, "I thought it was going to be another cheap publicity stunt, coming off the way the U.S. team had played in the Olympics, built around the prettier ones. And my boyfriend, who became my husband, he's British, even though he'd been pretty much living in France for years, running his restaurants. I convinced myself my real future was out f basketball and over there."

She stopped because she could hear the smart Tenten, the one inside her head always telling her to watch her mouth, asking her a question: Why are you telling this little jerk this much?

Because you think he cares?

"How'd you end up over there anyways?" Danzou asked.

"Long story. My mother died, my father's job took him over there, he liked it, we stayed. That's the bumper-sticker version." And, she thought, technically true. Though the long version was as long as a Russian novel.

Danzou didn't press her; she could see on his face that he was moving on to his next question. She cold already tell there were two things Danzou couldn't do: listen very well and care about what anybody else was saying when he did.

"So now you're running your little bistro or bar or whatever it is, according to Neji, and you play with Earthwind and the other European brothers. And now you're going to do something Cheryl Miller never got to do, or Nancy Lieberman or Annie Meyers, even though Lieberman and Meyers made it as far as NBA training camps once?"

"I'm only going to do it if I'm good enough."

"You're not."

"You know already, without even seeing me play."

"I know you might be something playing against girls. I believe Neji when he talks about how you can handle, the decisions you make, how fast you are. But I know something else: You're not fast enough, you're not strong enough, and you couldn't get your shot against me."

"Because I'm a woman."

"That's right! Because you're goddamn woman! What, that's politically incorrect? The Giants are supposed to give you a tryout if you suddenly decide you want to play strong safety next season? After that, how about we sue because you get it in your head you want to play center field for the Yankees? Believe me, I've got nothing against women, if you don't count my second wife. But there's a _reason_ why those teenaged tennis girls don't play the men. And there's a reason why Marion Jones, as fast as she is, doesn't run against the guy sprinters. And it's not because we don't believe in that affirmative-action crapola and the Equal Right Amendment and Gloria Steinem and Billie Jean King. _It's because as good as they are, they're not good enough._ This is sports. There isn't any affirmative action once the game starts. Best guys play. Best team wins."

Tenten said, "That's a very nice speech. I'm sure the National Organization pf Women would be awfully proud of you. I know I sure am. But what if I am good enough, Coach? Would you play me?"

"I would. But you're not. So I don't have to."

Tenten stood up. "All I'm asking for the next few days is for you not to go out of your way to sabotage me. Give me a fair shot with the other players. Will you at least make that deal?" She put out her hand. Reluctantly, he took it.

"Whatever," Danzou said.

"For the time being, we're stuck together," Tenten said. He was still sitting and made no move to get up, even with Tenten standing over him. "Maybe it's only a couple of days and then I'm back in Monte Carlo, out of your hair and out of your life. Why don't we just go ahead and make the best of it?"

"You're better off going back now."

"Practice at eleven?"

He slumped back in the chair. "Stretching at ten-thirty."

Tenten got to the door, turned around. The smart Tenten, the sensible one, was telling her to shut up, cut her losses, get out of there. But if she listened to that Tenten, Miss Brainy, she knew she wouldn't have ended up here in the first place.

"You know," she said, "it's to see that some things haven't changed while I've been away."

"Such as?"

"Such as basketball coaches."

Neji walked her out to the limousine that was waiting outside the Employees' Entrance and asked if she wanted to grab a bite later. Tenten said no, but he could do her a big favor.

"What do you need?"

"Game film."

"Your first night in New York, you want to stay in your room and look at game film? Of the New York Leaves?"

Jiraiya was inside with Danzou, having followed Tenten in his office. After that, Jiraiya had told her, he had a meeting with Sarutobi Sandaime, the NBA commissioner. But for now he wanted his go-to girl to go over to her suite at the Sherry Netherland, where he said his own apartment was He started to give her directions-across from the Plaza, next door to the Pierre, bit clock out front-but Tenten told him she knew where it was, she actually used to come downtown sometimes and mingle with the decent people.

"Just tapes of the last couple of games," Tenten said.

"Can I ask why? You're practicing with these guys tomorrow."

"Information is power."

"Gee," he said, "I never heard that one."

"I'll be fine on my own," she said.

Thinking to herself: When haven't you been?

Neji said, "Danzou give you a hard time?"

"I know you'll think this is less than ladylike, but he's one of those guys who like to bust balls, whether you have any or not."

"He can't help himself."

"He says I have no shot."

"He's wrong."

"He's wrong, I'm scared," she said. "Jump ball."

Neji opened that back of the door for her. "You made it this far. There's nothing to be afraid of."

Oh, she wanted to tell him, there's everything to be afraid of.

Instead she leaned up, kissed him quickly on both cheeks European style in the big city. "Call me later at the hotel. I'm sure you'll want to hear my observations on out team."

"Not necessarily," Neji Hyuuga said.

Neji was in the lobby of Five Penn, waiting for an elevator, when Jiraiya caught up with him.

"What did you really think?" Jiraiya said.

Only one elevator seemed to be working; the other one hadn't moved from the sixth floor since Neji'd been there.

"Danzou's a bad fucking guy," Neji said, the started bobbing his head immediately, like some kind of doll, saying to the boss, "I know, I know. You're going to get him turned around, it's what you do."

"Danzou's not a big-picture guy," Jiraiya said. "You either are or you're not. I always have been. And if you stay with me long enough and eventually learnt to watch that smart mouth of yours, you will be, too."

The only advice Neji's old mad had ever given him usually delivered by the back of his hand. "That's for nothing," he'd say when he'd come home from the saloon with another load on, "now do something." Hizashi Hyuuga had finally gone out for a pack of cigarettes when Neji was fifteen and hadn't come back until Neji's senior year in college, by which time he was Big East Player of the Year. Then he'd wanted to be a dad.

But the old man said something once that stayed with him, something he thought a lot about when he was around Jiraiya for more than about five minutes.

"You're in only in trouble, kid," the old man said, "when you start believing your own bullshit."

"It occurs to me," Neji said, "that you're trusting me an awful lot on this."

"I am!" Jiraiya said. "You want to know why? I'll tell you why. Because you're genuinely excited about this babe. How long're you in this job now? Couple of years? This is the first time I've seen you this excited about anything."

"You'll see for yourself tomorrow," Neji said, "if our guys don't try to mess her up too much, actually give her a chance."

"It's gonna be great!" Jiraiya said.

The elevator doors finally opened, and what seemed to be like half the building got out. Shizune, Jiraiya's secretary, was in the middle of the pack, probably going outside to have a cigarette. She was a tall, pretty liquid black hair, onyx eyes, and had made it known to Neji that she was here for him. She smiled, and he smiled back. Neji used to think she was the best-looking woman in the building. Only now Tenten Ama was the best-looking woman in the building.

The elevator doors closed. It was just the two of them. Jiraiya kept shifting his weight from one foot to another, snapping his fingers as he did. Neji wanted to think he was more excited than usual, but it was hard to tell with him, the guy was always a bundle of nerves.

"You're not going to be disappointed," Neji said quietly, staring straight ahead, watching the numbers change. "What I told you first night holds. She can really play."

The owner of the Leaves, his boss, turned and flashed his opening-night smile. Like Neji was just another camera, on the other side of one of those opening-night rope lines Jiraiya liked so much.

"Whatever," Jiraiya said. "I forgot how you said it in French already."

Neji said, "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I trust you, Neji. I'm sure our Miss Ama is a very nice player."

"You still don't get it. She's better than that."

Now Jiraiya was staring at Neji, a confused look on his face, as if he'd realized the guy standing next to him in the elevator was actually a total stranger.

"Who gives a shit if she's better than that?" Jiraiya said.

**Damn, this is quite possibly the longest chapter I've written. Hope you all like it. Reviews are nice motivation.**


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